The title of the linked article below is approaching hyperbole. Nevertheless, a basic understanding of these two different cultural dispositions — Askers and Guessers — could have real impact on not only your relationships with your clients, boss, and coworkers but perhaps every relationship in your life.
This column will change your life: Are you an Asker or a Guesser?
… We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything — a favour, a pay rise — fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. . . . A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”
Neither’s “wrong”, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor — or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it’s a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they’re diehard Askers.
(via Bobulate)
2 Comments
Great article.
Miles, I feel your friend’s pain. I’m from the U.S., but I studied German for eight years and spent considerable time there. I heard a lot of analogies to explain cultural differences between Americans and Germans, but never one as succinct as this.
Very true.
so, so, true.. my biggest culture shock moving from NZ to NYC.
NYC is a big place, but there is a culture, at least amongst the Italian American/Brooklyn type culture of being a lot more ‘guess’ focused than New Zealand. I had huge problems till i figured this out (and yet I had assumed would be so close culturally).
Conversely, my other buddy from New Zealand, traveled to Germany where he lived and worked for the same period (5 years) in Cologne. There, the culture is much more ‘ask’ focused than New Zealand, and so my buddy had a lot of adapting to do there before he figured out that they weren’t being rude, and that if he asked them to come to, say a party and they said ‘uh no i dont think i want to come’ it wasn’t in any way to be taken as rude.
anyway good words, asker vs guesser.